


Timor Mortis Confortat Me

by werpiper



Series: in the icing: Layers side stories [2]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Immortality, Masturbation, Mortality, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-02-03 12:18:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1744364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/werpiper/pseuds/werpiper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dwarves are rarities, mortal creatures in Rivendell.  One of them realizes this.</p><p>(This may or may not be what happens within-and-around chapter 20 of my story "Layers".  May fail to make sense either in context or standalone.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Timor Mortis Confortat Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thorinsmut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorinsmut/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Layers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1396483) by [werpiper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/werpiper/pseuds/werpiper). 



"I'll keep you supplied," said Nori, and Dwalin passed back the pipe. Nori drew in a deep drag. It wasn't bad stuff, though he still had some of the hobbit's stashed away, and that was better. He might even share it with the guardsman (no, the master-of-arms and defense, he corrected himself, silent and mocking) in good time.

They had time.

Though Nori couldn't shake the memory of the elf who'd come upon him rifling around the healer Elrond's infirmary. "That leaf, Master Dwarf," it said calmly, looking over his shoulder at the pipe-weed, "can kill you. Why," it paused, cocking its high head with birdlike grace, "do your people put such store by it, burning and breathing it?"

Nori had a knife half-out -- speaking of things that could kill you -- but he palmed it back, hoping the elf might not have noticed. He'd been startled, that's all. "Keeps a body warm, quiets a hungry belly," he replied. "It's medicinal." They were in the sickroom stores.

The elf looked at him, smooth-faced and unreadable. "Are your lives so brief," it asked mildly, "that some years less matter not, if your bodies can be warmer and more quiet?"

"Just so," Nori heard himself say, and the knife dropped back into his hand. He settled it upon the thin leggings at the juncture of the elf's torso and thigh. It gasped, and he fancied he could feel the pulse of the big artery through the blade. "Is your life," he drawled, "so endless that your body matters not?"

He looked up into the elf's eyes, grey as an overcast sky. Its mouth was open, and its breath caught before it answered him: "No."

Its long hand clasped his wrist, lightly enough, not pulling or pushing the knife away. Experimentally, Nori curled his fingers, pressing the edge no deeper but drawing a line downward, inward. The elf gasped, and Nori smiled. He reached up, put an open hand on the elf's shoulder, and drew it down to its knees, letting the knife scrape lightly over the leggings, onto the skin beneath its tunic. They were nearly of a height then. Curious, Nori leaned in.

Its mouth opened to his, cool and tasting of nothing, like water. For a moment Nori loved it, like the first raindrops landing on one's hot and weary face. Then the deep grey gaze enveloped him entire, and Nori gasped like someone about to drown. The knife clattered to the floor.

The elf's hand was still on his wrist, and, inexorably, it dragged his hand further inside its tunic. Its chest as smooth as a flower-petal. He felt the pulse at its heart, hypnotically slow. Against his mouth he felt it murmuring, "Our bodies are the vessels of a fire, the secret fire of Iluvatar." It kissed him deeper, water flowing. "What matter makes the fuel, to the eternal flame?" It held him fast, mouth moving, as if it had forever to do so. As perhaps it did.

Nori couldn't answer, couldn't even breathe. He shivered all over and the elf drew him in. But even as he moved into its embrace, his boot scuffed the knife -- and with some remaining reflex he reached for it, felt the rough antler handle on his fingertips. He grabbed it, twisted away and ran for his life.

He managed to school his breathing when he heard Kili and Fili, managed to follow them. To talk. To look at Dwalin, bald and scarred and smiling, and nick some food from Fili's plate. To act like himself, perhaps even to be himself.

Later he found Dwalin, surrounded by rock on all sides, protected from the wild storm that raged over Rivendell. They talked, they smoked. When Dwalin fell asleep, a soldier at rest, Nori curled cautiously beside him. Dwalin radiated warmth like a banked fire, and the warg-skin he wore everywhere smelled like an old warg-skin, and he snored.

 _I'd touch you again. Mahal, I liked you that way._ Dwalin's voice echoed in Nori's mind, and he pressed himself closer to Dwalin's solid heat. He opened his trousers and stroked his own pelt, then nuzzled his face into the warg-skin, which smelled like Dwalin underneath. Trembling and quick, he began to touch himself, each breath filled with the living and the dead, listening to the rain pour down. Hammer and anvil and forge, as Mahal had crafted him, made him for work and creating. Dwalin muttered and slumped to one side, one huge arm enfolding Nori, knuckledusters resting heavily atop Nori's bare hip. Nori came, biting himself into silence as his orgasm lit him through with fire. He could be silent, he could be stone surrounded by stone. He wouldn't live long enough to see a mountain eroded by rain.

By the Maker, for a dwarf, there would still be time enough.

**Author's Note:**

> i've had too many people die on me in the last couple weeks, working it out here.
> 
> many many thanks to Thorinsmut for consistent and vocal kindnesses :)


End file.
